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Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne (Broadview literary texts)

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Zastrozzi: A Romance (1810) and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (1811) are Gothic horror novel masterpieces by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Zastrozzi was the first published prose work by Shelley in 1810. He wrote Zastrozzi when he was seventeen and a student at Eton. People remember Percy Bysshe Shelley today as a poet who wrote Ozymandias, To a Skylark, The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, and The Masque of Anarchy. Shelley began his literary career, however, with the publication of two Gothic horror romance novels, Zastrozzi in 1810 and St. Irvyne in 1811. Shelley is regarded as one of the greatest poets in the English language. His prose writings, however, have been neglected and overlooked. The Broadview Press edition presents these two novels together along with the Wolfstein chapbook and the shorter works The Assassins and The Coliseum.

Zastrozzi is about obsession, revenge, and the agony of unrequited love. Zastrozzi first kidnaps Verezzi and imprisons him in a dungeon. Bernardo and Ugo guard him. Zastrozzi seeks revenge against Verezzi to avenge his mother. Matilda, the Contessa di Laurentini, is obsessively in love with Verezzi. Verezzi, Il Conte Verezzi, however, is in love with Julia, La Marchesa de Strobazzo. Zastrozzi manipulates Matilda to destroy Verezzi. He exploits Matilda's obsessive love for Verezzi to destroy both.

Zastrozzi is a complex psychological thriller. The story is not a simple tale about good versus evil. Zastrozzi goes beyond good and evil. Zastrozzi is a precursor of the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche. Pietro Zastrozzi is a precursor of Rodion Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment and Also Sprach Zarathustra. He is a superman who dismisses ordinary morality. He is an atheist for whom all is permitted. Zastrozzi is a demi-god, an assassin, who creates his own values and laws and morality.

Zastrozzi is a tale of pure horror. Zastrozzi is not satiated to kill merely the body. He seeks to kill the soul. Death is not the worst that can happen. He keeps Verezzi alive to be able to inflict unspeakable tortures on him and to terrorize and to manipulate him. Zastrozzi seeks to punish not only the alleged wrongdoer, but to punish their progeny as well. Ironically, Verezzi and Zastrozzi may have had the same father. Verezzi is his brother. Zastrozzi seeks revenge against his own father, his human Creator. It is a revolt against God. Zastrozzi is angry with God and seeks to create his own reality, his own world. He becomes a god himself. The inquisition has no terrors for him. Death has no terror for him. He creates his own values and morality. He can do whatever he wishes with other human beings. He decides their fate, whether they will live or die. Zastrozzi reaches the limits of human horror and depravity and terror.

Man rejects God and becomes a god himself. God is dead. This theme was later central to the Gothic novel Frankenstein by Shelley's wife Mary Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the preface to that novel in 1818 published anonymously and according to John Lauritsen in The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (2007), Percy Bysshe Shelley was the real author of Frankenstein. At the very least, Percy contributed major portions to that novel which shows his influence on every page.

St. Irvyne has a similar and related theme to Frankenstein. Can man find the secret to life? In St. Irvyne, the alchemist and Rosicrucian Ginotti has "a desire of unveiling the latent mysteries of nature". St. Irvyne, and William Godwin's St. Leon and Frankenstein, are based on a real-life German physician and scientist, Johann Cohausen, who claimed to have found the secret to immortality in his satire Hermippus Redivivus (1742).

The main character of St. Irvyne is Wolfstein, a solitary wanderer, who like the Being in Frankenstein, seeks friendship and a meaning for his existence. Wolfstein asks why he was created by the Creator. God creates nothing in vain. But Wolfstein can find no meaning for his creation. Wolfstein wanders the Alps near Geneva, the scene of the later Frankenstein. He is rescued by monks who prevent his attempted suicide. Bandits then attack them. Wolfstein poisons the leader of the bandits, Cavigni, and escapes. Megalena, also held captive, escapes and befriends Wolfstein. They flee to Genoa followed by Ginotti.

Ginotti is a Rosicrucian, a member of the Rose Cross Order, a medieval sect that sought through science, by chemistry or alchemy, to find the secret to eternal existence, immortality. This idea is based on the experiments conducted by Paracelsus, Sanctorius, the Belgian Rosicrucian Jan van Helmont, and by Johann Cohausen, who claimed to have found the secret to long life in the satire Hermippus Redivivus.

Ginotti seduces Wolfstein's sister, Eloise de St. Irvyne, who wrongly believes that Wolfstein is dead. St. Irvyne is the name of a castle in France. Ginotti then will impart the secret to immortality to Wolfstein if he becomes a Rosicrucian himself and denies God. Tragedy and horror result when man seeks to unveil the secrets of life and of nature.

St. Irvyne has uncanny and striking similarities to Frankenstein in both theme and in style. Both novels take place in the Swiss Alps around Geneva, where Percy Bysshe Shelley later lived. Both main characters, Wolfstein and Frankenstein, are based on the names of German cities. Both novels have scientists who want to find the secret to eternal existence or immortality. Both novels have epigraphs from John Milton's Paradise Lost. Even the cadences and literary styles are similar in both novels. In Frankenstein, the Being says: "I will glut the maw of death." In St. Irvyne, the narrator says: "...glut itself with hellish pleasure..." The Being in Frankenstein speaks in Shelleyan cadences that are a hallmark of St. Irvyne and the earlier Zastrozzi. How uncanny is that? Like Percy Shelley himself, the Being in Frankenstein has admired and adopted the style of John Milton, a poet, not a novelist.

St. Irvyne foreshadows Frankenstein with its theme of a scientist or alchemist, Ginotti, trying to ascertain the secret of life. The book is an important and seminal Gothic novel of the Romantic period and is highly recommended.

The main characters of the novella The Assassins (1814) are Albedir and Khaled who encounter a stranger in a story about zealots who are determined to bring justice and benevolence to mankind through assassination and violence. The Coliseum is about Helen and her blind father, who encounter a stranger known as Il Diavolo di Bruto, Brutus's Devil, in the ruins of the Roman coliseum.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was a revolutionary visionary and firebrand who pushed the boundaries in literature and in his life. Karl Marx wrote that Shelley "was essentially a revolutionist." Zastrozzi reflects Shelley's artistic vision. The themes and central ideas of Zastrozzi are ones that would reappear. Parricide and revenge, for example, would be the principal themes of Shelley's classic 1819 play The Cenci. Zastrozzi is an unfairly overlooked and ignored Gothic horror masterpeice by one of the greatest Romantic writers.

Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne are highly recommended. The Broadview Press edition includes these two seminal novels, the novellas The Assassins and The Coliseum, and the Wolfstein chapbook, in the definitive texts.